Friends and family say they had not seen Stoudemire cry since he was 12, when his father, Hazell Stoudemire Sr., died of a heart attack. But later Saturday at the First Baptist Church of Lake Wales, Amar’e Stoudemire stood before his brother’s coffin and about 1,000 people, including nine members of the Knicks organization, bowed his head again, and wept.

“That was my big brother,” Stoudemire told the gathering, pausing between words muffled with tears. “He kept me off the streets. He was like my guardian angel.”

The police say Stoudemire’s brother Hazell Stoudemire Jr. died instantly at 1:42 a.m. Monday. His 2007 Cadillac Escalade was traveling fast on Route 27 in Lake Wales when it ran into a tractor-trailer, flipping, and ending a troubled life at 35.

Hazell Stoudemire was in and out of prisons, and family and friends did not gloss over his life. The day Amar’e was drafted into the N.B.A. in 2002, Hazell was serving time in a New York state prison after convictions on drug dealing and sexual abuse. Their mother, Carrie Stoudemire, violated parole to be at the draft proceedings, and was sent to jail after returning to Florida.

“He was trying to change his life,” Amar’e Stoudemire said. “He’d just told me he was trying to do right, to get everything right.”

Whatever Hazell Stoudemire could not get right in his life, he steered his brother Amar’e, six years his junior, away from the path he took.

Lincoln Avenue in Lake Wales is where trouble resides and the surrounding mean streets have no off-ramps.

“This is a small town, but Lincoln Avenue is just like any bad area you’d find in an inner city,” said Burney Hayes, a former police officer and the Lake Wales High School junior varsity basketball coach, who mentored the Stoudemire boys. “See it, want it, name it, you can have it on Lincoln Avenue. Shoot dice, gambling, drugs, prostitution, all of it. You get caught there, you might never get out.”

Stoudemire said his brother Hazell would never let him go to Lincoln Avenue. He would never even let him pass through that way en route to their grandmother’s house.

“He guided me my whole life,” Stoudemire said. “Even when he was locked up, he’d write me letters. Every week, I’d get a letter. He guided me all the way to the N.B.A. I wouldn’t have made it without him.”

When Carrie Stoudemire, announced as an evangelist and prophetess, addressed the audience, she did not sugarcoat her life or her son Hazell’s.

“It’s hard to take the hood to the millionaire’s life,” she said. “Hazell stopped Amar’e from coming through the streets. Hazell stopped Amar’e from getting on the drugs. I was addicted, and Hazell was doing his things. But at the same time, he was trying to be a big brother, trying to be a father, trying to be a mother.”

Those who knew Hazell Stoudemire say he could have also been an N.B.A. player.

After spending a year at a sheriff’s youth camp, with his mother in prison, Hazell was assigned to a foster home in Bradenton, Fla. In the fall of 1994, Bradenton Southeast High School had gone to the state’s final four the previous two years, guided by a point guard named Peter Warrick, who later became a Florida State football standout and a Cincinnati Bengals first-round draft pick.

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“I’d never heard of Hazell,” said Bob Carroll, who was Bradenton Southeast’s basketball coach. “All of a sudden, here was a 6-foot-9, 230-pound kid, solid, very muscular, a man even though he was just a junior, coming to me and asking if he could play basketball.”

One problem: Hazell didn’t know how to play.

“The first day of practice, during shootaround, his first shot went straight into the backboard from about 15 feet — boom!” Warrick recalled. “Hazell went right to our coach after that and said: ‘Teach me how to play. I don’t want people to laugh at me.’ ”

Soon Hazell was averaging 15 points and 20 rebounds a game, and Bradenton Southeast was tallying win after win, eventually going 35-0, the final game a state championship in which Stoudemire had 20 points and 20 rebounds.

It was not that game, though, that Carroll remembers most. It was the team’s last home game, when each player received a carnation with a ribbon of orange and blue, the school’s colors, to give to his mother in a pregame ceremony.

“Hazell was so excited,” Carroll said. “I’d never met his mother, never even saw her. But obviously she must have been out of jail because she was going to be there that night.”

One by one, each player’s name was called, and he presented his mother with a carnation. When Hazell Stoudemire’s name was called, Carrie Stoudemire was nowhere to be found.

“He just stood there with his flower, staring at the door, waiting for it to open,” Carroll said. “But it never did.”

A few minutes later, Hazell Stoudemire went to center court for the game’s opening jump ball. Just then, the gym door opened and in walked Carrie Stoudemire.

“Hold on, Ref,” Hazell said, running off the court, grabbing the carnation and running over to give it to his mother.

Three weeks after the state championship, the school had its spring break. When classes resumed, Hazell Stoudemire was gone.

“I heard that his mother came, told him to pack his stuff and get in the car, that they were heading to New York,” Carroll said. “Just like that, Hazell disappeared. That was the only year he played basketball. It’s just so sad. I felt so sorry for him. He never really had a chance.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 12, 2012, on Page SP2 of the New York edition with the headline: Stoudemire Mourns ‘Guardian Angel’. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe